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ViewCast Niagara GoStream SURF
ViewCast's Niagara GoStream SURF is a portable system that requires a bit of at-home tweaking before going on the road.
Price: $10,995
For more information, contact:
ViewCast
www.viewcast.com
ViewCast launched its Niagara GoStream product at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show a few years ago in an attempt to entice broadcasters to use its rugged and relatively small encoding device. Both dockable and portable, GoStream has the ability to be plugged in to a rack mounted system in a dual-device configuration (two units side by side) and to be used as a stand-alone portable encoder.
The GoStream met with some interest and was eventually replaced by the GoStream Plus. Both units still had traditional S-video and RCA composite connectors, plus unbalanced audio, which wasn't exactly up to broadcast specifications. The new Niagara GoStream SURF version, however, adds professional BNC connectors and balanced XLR audio, has approximately 100GB of data storage free (it has other storage on the machine, but this is reserved for maintenance and operations), and is based around the Osprey 240 card.
I ran SURF through its paces over the last few weeks and have come away impressed, as always, by the quality of the encoding the unit is capable of producing. It's a ViewCast encoder through and through, meaning it leverages Simulstream to allow for simultaneous encoding in Windows Media, Real, Flash, and MPEG (H.264) with ease.
Unfortunately, there's also a significant amount of work to be done on the user interface, both on the LCD screen and on the web. Here are a few of my main observations from using the unit.
Boot-Up Time
From the time I plugged in and powered up the SURF to the time I could access any of the buttons to start encoding, approximately 90 seconds passed. This is a Windows box, so it's not an instant-on device like some Linux-based encoding systems. In fact, on the first time through or after a factory restore, you'll be forced to spend about 3 minutes inputting the date, time, and NTSC/PAL choice before being able to use even the preset encoding options. However, SURF is also capable of encoding a few flavors of streaming media that Linux has difficulty with.
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